Combustion Turbine Facilities

JEA owns and operates three natural gas Combustion Turbine generating facilities that have quickly become workhorses in our stable because they’re clean and efficient to operate.

Brandy Branch Generating Station: Located on the Westside, next-door to the 100-acre solar farm, Brandy Branch is JEA’s only combined cycle generation facility, which puts it in a league of its own when it comes to generation stations.

Kennedy Generating Station: Kennedy Generating Station is located on the site of the first, large-scale electric generation facility ever built in Jacksonville, the Talleyrand Avenue Light Plant, which opened in 1943.

Brandy Branch Generating Station

Located on the far Westside of Jacksonville near Baldwin, Brandy Branch is known for its clean environmental performance and its huge General Electric combustion turbines, which are the size of jet engines.

Brandy Branch was commissioned in 2001 with three 170 MW simple cycle combustion turbines. It’s primary fuel is natural gas and its secondary fuel is ultra-low sulfur diesel, although this is hardly ever used. JEA further enhanced the efficiency and performance of this plant in 2005 by converting two of the three simple cycle combustion turbines to a 2x1 Combined Cycle configuration.

Combined cycle power plants feature gas and steam turbines. The gas turbine generates electricity using natural gas fuel, while the steam turbine generates electricity using waste heat from the gas turbine. The waste heat converts water into steam, in a HRSG (Heat Recovery Steam Generator). This process is extremely efficient since exhaust heat that would otherwise be lost through the exhaust stack is reused. Thus JEA buys fuel for the gas turbines and gets power for free from the steam turbine. It’s the kind of efficiency we like to employ in our electric system. Brandy Branch Generating Station is capable of producing over 700 MW of power.

Kennedy Generating Station & Greenland Energy Center

Both of these plants are equipped with two General Electric 7FA,170 MW simple cycle combustion turbines. These turbines run on natural gas and, like Brandy Branch, there are special underground natural gas lines that bring the gas to the plants. The turbines can also operate on Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel, as a back-up. Both plants are unmanned sites and can be started and monitored remotely from a special control room at Brandy Branch, which is considered our natural gas generation headquarters.

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JEA operates five power plant sites in Jacksonville, has an ownership interest in a power plant in Georgia, and purchases power locally from a solar field and a landfill gas facility. Diversity in fuel mix is very important in providing reliable, economical and environmentally-sound electricity.